Time To Scrap the Body Mass Index

A new study by researchers at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine, in Rochester, Minnesota, suggests that it may be time toss out the measure of health known as the Body Mass Index, or BMI, which was invented by Belgian Adolphe
Quetelet between 1830 and 1850. Science News reports that the study, which was published last Friday in The Lancet, found that patients with a low BMI had a higher risk of death
from heart disease than those with normal BMI, and that overweight patients had better survival
rates and fewer heart problems than those with a normal BMI.
The story suggests that this apparently perverse result, drawn from data from 40
studies covering 250,000 people with heart disease, did not
suggest that obesity was not a health threat but rather that
the 100-year-old BMI test was too blunt an instrument to be
trusted.  Maria Grazia Franzosi from the Instituto Mario Negri in
Milan, writing in the same issue of the Lancet, noted that a
52-country study comparing four different tests — BMI,
waist-to-hip ratio, waist measure and hip measure — found that
waist-to-hip was the best predictor of heart attack risk.
Read the entire article in Science News.